Bring in the lawyers

When collectors want to purchase an expensive work of art, they contact their lawyers to write up a contract with the dealer, spelling out pages of contingencies and indemnity clauses. ‘We have a steady stream of business writing agreements for collectors and galleries,’ said Jo Backer Laird, a Manhattan arts lawyer and a former general counsel at Christie’s. ‘We didn’t see much of this just ten years ago.’

When someone believes he didn’t make enough money selling a work of art  — Lord Edward Spencer-Churchill for the sale of his Basquiat painting last year through the London dealer Gerard Faggionato; Ronald Perelman for the 2011 sale of a Jeff Koons sculpture by New York’s Gagosian Gallery — he calls his lawyer to institute a lawsuit. When someone believes he paid too much for a work of art (the Korean collector Najung Seung sued Manhattan dealer Mary Dinaburg after spending $290,000 for a Julian Schnabel painting later valued at $110,000), he calls his lawyer and starts a lawsuit.

How much has the art world ‘lawyered up’? There are no data maintained on the number of lawyers who identify their practice in the art world, but John Cahill, a Manhattan art lawyer and current chairman of the New York City Bar Association’s art law committee, speculated that the number has tripled within the past decade, as have the number of lawsuits. At New York’s Hughes, Hubbard & Reed, for instance, the art law division began in the late 1990s with just one lawyer and now employs half a dozen; while the prominent Manhattan art lawyer Peter Stern has more than doubled his art trade billings (‘let’s just say millions of dollars’) over the past five years. In addition, more and more law schools around the country now offer art law courses and seminars (‘Students come to this school specifically to take my class,’ said John Henry Merryman, professor at Stanford University Law School, who teaches an annual art law course).